The Way We Vote

The Local Dimension of American Suffrage

Alec C. Ewald

Publication Year: 2009

To a degree unique among democracies, the United States has always placed responsibility for running national elections in the hands of county, city, and town officials. The Way We Work explores the causes and consequences of America’s localized voting system, explaining its historical development and its impact on American popular sovereignty and democratic equality.
The book shows that local electoral variation has endured through dramatic changes in American political and constitutional structure, and that such variation is the product of a clear, repeated developmental pattern, not simple neglect or public ignorance. Legal materials, statutes and Congressional debates, state constitutional-convention proceedings, and the records of contested Congressional elections illuminate a long record of federal and state intervention in American electoral mechanics. Lawmakers have always understood that a certain level of disorder characterizes U.S. national elections, and have responded by exercising their authority over suffrage practices--but only in limited ways, effectively helping to construct our triply-governed electoral system.

Cover

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

There is a convention of thanking one’s spouse or partner last, presumably for
dramatic effect. I would prefer to remove any doubt that my first and last debt
is to my wife, Emily. Thank you.
Though it stings to know I am forgetting many important people, it is still
a great pleasure to acknowledge here those who have helped in the writing ...

Introduction

In the long and roiled wake of the 2000 election, Americans are still fighting
over the way we vote. Voter registration, ballot design and technology,
polling-place selection, who should pay for elections (and how much), how
to count (and recount) votes, the process for “purging” voters—all once
lumped under the unglamorous title of “election administration” and widely...

1. “Times, Places, and Manner”: Early American Voting

The conventional history of the American right to vote is straightforward,
its landmarks familiar. The state constitutions of the early nineteenth century
largely did away with property tests, moving toward suffrage for all
white males. During Reconstruction, the Union Army and the Republican controlled
Congress collaborated to enfranchise African Americans; the...

2. “Who Shall Create the Voter”: The Late Nineteenth Century

It is commonly assumed that our current debates mark the first time the national
and state governments, the courts, and reformers have engaged in sustained
examination of American election administration.1 In fact, the period
between the Civil War and the turn of the century amounted to a decades long
running debate over how Americans voted, and recovering the political...

3. “To Promote the Exercise of That Right”: The Twentieth Century

Nineteenth-century federal interventions in election law altered how and
when Americans voted, erected supervisory regimes that endured for decades,
changed the constitutional text itself (with the Reconstruction
Amendments), and strengthened doctrines interpreting older text (particularly
the Elections Clause) in a way that would provide crucial support for...

4. Mediated Popular Sovereignty: Local Suffrage Practices and American Self-Rule

Between the disc jockey’s tables and the food tent, Gadsden County election
supervisor Shirley Green Knight set up her new optical-scan voting machine
at a Sawdust town party one late-spring evening in 2004. One of Florida’s
poorest counties and its only majority-black county, Gadsden had the highest
rate of disqualified ballots in the presidential election of 2000. Knight, who...

5. Exclusion, Equality, and the Local Dimension of American Suffrage

Whereas the lasting images of the 2000 presidential contest were Palm Beach
County’s butterfly ballot and the faces of beleaguered recount officers peering
deep into the dimples of chad, the 2004 election gave us the voters of
Ohio. Some city voters gave up after inadequate numbers of voting machines
forced them to stand in line for hours, while their peers in nearby suburban...

Conclusion

In the United States, voting has always been a local practice. To say this is
not to deny the considerable importance of national and state constitutions
and statutes in shaping American suffrage. But we have erred by focusing too
much on the formal, symbolic, and constitutional aspects of “the right to
vote” and on the aggregate sense of “voter behavior.” As powerful as these approaches...

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